Intel has given developers another peek at its upcoming Core i7-980X Extreme Edition processor.
Intel's plans for the six-core, 12-thread, 32nm Core i7-980X - formerly code-named Gulftown - were made clear by the venue for the demo: the annual Game Developers Conference (GDC 2010) taking place this week in San Francisco.
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COMMENTS

"Grandad...

@ Grandad...

"...tell me about the days when processors only had one core!"

what You didnt like he transputer CPU back in the day?

http://www.wotug.org/transputer.shtml

"The Transputer

The INMOS Transputer was a pioneering parallel computing processor of the 1980s from the Welsh chip design company INMOS. It the first general purpose microprocessor designed specifically to be used in parallel. The design of the Transputer included serial links that allowed it to communicate with up to four other Transputers.

Transputer instructions comprised 8-bit words broken into two 4-bit nibbles. The high-order nibble contained the instruction code. The "lower" nibble contained data, either for arithmetic operations, for addressing memory, or as an operand to the indirect opcode, which was used to add more instructions to those available using the the 16 possible using a nibble. Of the 16 opcodes available, 3 were set aside for special purposes: one was "prefix", and added a new nibble to the current data item; one was negative-prefix, performing the same function as prefix but providing a negative rather than positive value, and one was operate, which took the currently assembled value and used it as an opcode. This scheme permitted a very dense instruction format, with as many as 4 useful instructions possible in a single 32-bit memory word. The normal average was a little over 2, because of the need to load constants in more than one operation.

One big advantage of this scheme was that it permitted 16 bit and 32-bit transputers to share the same binary format and, in many cases, the same compiled programs.

Son...

great , but why not go directly to 8 cores !

Now intel bods and others etc with the samples ,tell us how much faster is a current x264 http://x264.nl/ HD 1080P Encode running on these six-core Gulftown compared to say your old Intel-Core-2-Quad-Q8400-2.66GHz, your i7 Quad 1.6Hgz laptop , and top of the line i7 desktop quads ?